More than most artists, poets are free in their creations. Valéry commented that after – and only after – the poet has spoken does he know what he has said. It is also true, and for the same reason, that what the poet has said may be taken in many different ways by his readers. Blake would have agreed with Shelley’s note about God at the end of ‘Queen Mab’, that ‘the works of His fingers have borne witness against Him.’ In whatever spirit of humility a great poet undertakes to demonstrate a transcendental view of our situation, and justify the ways of God to men, the labours of his imagination will be reinterpreted and even misrepresented by the different vision of later poets.

Milton’s works are made to bear witness against him, and so are Dante’s, but in more far-reaching and more subtle ways. These are analysed by Steve Ellis with great sympathy and penetration, and his book is one of the most interesting for all lovers of poetry to have appeared for some time. In La Poesia de Dante Croce made a distinction between Dante the poet and Dante ‘filosofico e politico’, the philosopher and politician. It is a distinction only valid in terms of what other poets have made of Dante, superimposing upon that image of ‘the poet’ their own philosophical and political attitudes. It is a truism that Shakespeare’s multitudinous world is a kind of mirror, in which all who gaze can find their own preoccupations and individualities. But Dante’s case is different. It is the organisation of his poetry itself that produces counter-organisations, radically different world-views, and demonstrations of different kinds of spiritual system.

In our poetry, Shelley is the prime case. Keble observed that the intensity of the Paradiso is produced by a harmony of abstractions – light, motion and music – and Steve Ellis points out that this is precisely the Shelleyan formula in his long poems, notably in the last act of ‘Prometheus Unbound’. Shelley contrived to admire Dante deeply, while rejecting everything in his system of order and belief, and Croce is only rationalising this state of affairs when he separates the ‘poetry’ of Dante from his superannuated local beliefs. What Croce omits to say, however, is that such poetry can have no vitality without beliefs, beliefs deeply and passionately held, and it is their own beliefs with which the poet and his reader at a later date are reanimating the world order of Dante. Shelley’s plea for free love in ‘Epipsychidion’ bases itself on Virgil’s description of the relationship between the blessed in Purgatorio XV, in which the caritate they enjoy grows rather than diminishes with the number of those who partake of it. In Shelley this becomes

True love in this differs from gold and clay,That to divide is not to take away

– lines which, as Ellis observes, are not much different from an adulterer’s use of the text ‘Love thy neighbour’ as he schemes to enter the bed of the lady next door. They ‘gravelled’ T. S. Eliot when he was composing ‘The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism’, yet Eliot was to impose his own philosophy on Dante, affirming the essentiality of Hell’s existence, and that true sinners go there accepting and rejoicing in their own evil individuality.

For Eliot, the ‘horror’ from which Dante’s imagination redeemed the modern age was that of Kipling’s Tomlinson, the Hollow Man, and all those ‘decent godless people’ without substance enough to be either saved or damned. Dante created individuals, inadvertently perhaps, by exhibiting them in all the vigour of their past actions, and in all the awareness of where those had led them. Eliot’s reverence for Dante’s characters is curiously like the way the fiction reader feels about his favourites – the monsters, the comics, the men and women in art who move and fascinate us because they are not sunk in ordinary everyday nullity. For Eliot, Dante wrote a kind of theological novel, but Eliot also saw in him the source of Baudelaire’s genius, the conviction of doing evil which gives intensity to Les Fleurs du Mal, and places the individual talent of its author in the mainstream of Christian tradition.

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Letters

SIR: How can John Bayley (LRB, 15 March) call Auden ‘exemplar of English poets for whom Dante’s example has meant little or nothing’ when Auden himself has written in the ‘Sessions of the Poets’ section of the first part of New Year Letter:

So, when my name is called, I face,Presiding coldly on my case,That lean hard-bitten pioneerWho spoiled a temporal careerAnd to the supernatural broughtHis passion, senses, will and thought,By Amor Rationalis ledThrough the three kingdoms of the dead.

And when he imitated him fairly directly in the only relatively recently published unfinished poem ‘In the Year of My Youth’, and has obviously approved by following the practice of establishing ideological frameworks for verse, though in Auden’s case the ideology may have shifted rather more than in Dante’s. If Auden takes Dante’s protestation ‘Io non Enea, io non Paolo sono’ more seriously than did Yeats and Shelley, Dante is a rich enough poet to have many kinds of disciple. In an essay ‘Criticism in a Mass Society’ Auden writes: ‘The three greatest influences on my own work have been, I think, Dante, Langland and Pope.’

SIR: I bow to Mr Ansen’s good memory (Letters, 7 June) for things in Auden which I should have remembered myself. But I stand by the comment to which he takes exception. However much Auden may have invoked Dante, Dante does not get into his verse. For one thing, it is never dignified. Few English poets are less like Dante, it seems to me.